Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a child development class.
Professor: There’s something interesting about how little kids see the world. Until a certain age, they actually don’t realize that if you put something in a different container, you still have the same amount of stuff. For instance, if you pour a glass of water into a bowl, adults and older kids will think it’s obvious that there’s the same amount of water there. But a really young kid will get confused by it. They don’t really understand the difference between what something looks like and how much there is. Being able to tell the difference is called “conservation.”
Here’s what an experiment about conservation would look like. You could show a child two glasses of water that are exactly the same size, and they’d be filled to the same level. You ask the child whether there’s the same amount of water in both glasses… they’d say “yes.” Then, take one of the glasses and pour its contents into a second glass that’s very tall but very thin, like a vial. So, the level of water is higher in the second glass. Then you’d ask: “Is the amount of water still the same in both glasses?” A child who’s old enough to understand conservation will say that there is. A child who doesn’t understand it will say, no, there’s more water in the tall, thin glass, because it’s filled to a higher level.
The concept of conservation applies to weight, too. You can show a very young child a round piece of clay, and then stretch it out so that it looks longer and wider. They’ll think that the clay must also be heavier than it was before, since it seems as if there’s more clay there. Children start to understand that things like volume and weight stay the same when they’re fairly young, but they don’t fully develop the understanding of conservation until they’re 9, 10… maybe 11 years old.
Narrator: Using the examples from the lecture, explain how you could determine whether a young child understood conservation.
From the lecture, it seems like there are a number of substances that you could use to illustrate whether a… a young child understands conversion. Uh, for example… you could build a snowman or a snowball, um, uh, of a certain size and then another one that’s the same size, and then… take one of the snowballs and put it into a different shape or smash it on the ground… and ask them if, you know… whether it’s still the same amount of snow. Um, or you could have a bowl of cereal, and put it in a different bowl to see whether… the child thinks it’s still the same amount of cereal. You could use almost anything, any household product, to test this.
The student demonstrates an excellent understanding of the lecture by offering her own examples. The examples are similar to the ones in the lecture, but not exactly the same. Note: You are not required to use different examples. The instructions tell you to use the examples from the lecture, and in fact, coming up with different examples is risky, if it takes too much time or thought to do so. The student’s response is not perfect (she calls the phenomenon “conversion,” rather than “conservation”), but such flaws are minor.